Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse

* Article: Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of the Commons. David Bollier. International Journal of the Commons, V. 18, N. 1, pp. 288–301, 2024.

URL = https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389

"Over the past two decades, hundreds of different commons around the world have arisen and developed working ties with peers, creating what might be called the Commonsverse. To elected officials, legislatures, bureaucracies, courts, and business people, the commons continues to be seen as a failed management regime, one that implicitly needs state or market intervention and control. As the essays of this special issue suggest, however, many projects and activists are seeing commons as a powerful, versatile force for change. The piecemeal efforts to build a Commonsverse amounts to a quest to build a parallel polis. Commoning honors wholesome values and different ways of being, knowing, and acting while allowing ordinary people to assert some measure of self-determination in the face of capitalist markets and state power.This essay explores a broad range of contemporary commons activities, the “ontological politics” they are engendering, and the challenges they face in expanding and institutionalizing commoning. Future development should focus on the potential of commons/public partnerships, new infrastructures to make commoning easier, legal hacks to open up zones of commoning, the potential of relationalized finance, and new institutional structures of care."

Contents

David Bollier:

"While mainstream players sometimes acknowledge a growing literature treating commons as social systems, such claims often amount to a cultural posture – a virtue-signaling speech act that lays claim to democratic, egalitarian ideals, much as the word “sustainable” is used by people as a performative proxy for ecologically committed behavior.2

As the essays of this special issue suggest, however, the commons in modern times is a far more powerful, versatile, and seminal idea. It refers to a shadow culture with diverse manifestations that is barely recognized publicly, perhaps because commons, taken seriously, reject many norms of capital-driven markets and state power. Commoners tend to see climate change and myriad ecological crises, social inequality, precarity, and racialist divides as inescapable symptoms of economic growth, “development” and “progress.” While the commons discourse helps make this critique of capitalism, many commoners also see the discourse as a useful scaffolding for building a transformative, alternative vision for society. Wary of the limitations of liberal meliorism, commoners tend to focus on bottom-up forms of social association that can, with the right structures and implementation, empower ordinary people to meet their own needs directly. The discourse affirms the need for personal responsibilities and benefits achieved through collective action, and to the importance of open spaces for creative, democratic, and local participation.

The essays of this special issue of the International Journal of the Commons explore how these dynamics are being played out in some very different contexts. We see how ordinary people are developing innovative forms of commoning in major cities like Barcelona (childcare commons, knowledge commons) (Zechner, 2024)), Bologna and Naples (commons/public partnerships) (Vesco & Busso, 2024), and in various ecovillages around the world. We encounter new types of online governance commons, such as DAOs (digital autonomous organizations), platform co-operatives, and alternative local currencies. A burgeoning academic and popular literature is assessing the immense variety of contemporary commons as vehicles for re-imagining the future. (Bollier, 2021; Dardot & Lavel, 2019; Standing, 2022; Broumas, 2020; Varvarousis, 2022; Gerhardt, 2023).

What type of future is implied by the commons manifesting today (or whose members come to recognize them as commons)? Contributors to this issue point to some ways in which political economy and culture are being reinvented, often by adapting conventional frameworks of law, policy, and governance. We see how commons projects are challenging received notions of democratic liberalism and bureaucracy, as Roy L. Heidelberg observes in his piece (Heidelberg, 2024), and how state bureaucracies and politicians are using unexpected twists in municipal government to support commoning in numerous contexts (Zechner, 2024).

While these vanguard developments point to important paradigm shifts in public administration, policymaking and politics, it’s important to note that these changes are driven by changes at a subjective, experiential level of everyday life. People want to change the terms of their livelihoods and social practices. In her essay in this volume, Zechner emphasizes the importance of “micro-politics” – the social and personal “spheres of meaning and signification” that affect how people relate to each other – and how they feel and behave differently as a result (Zechner, 2024). By her reckoning, changes in the micropolitics of life provide “the most solid basis for engaging lasting and sustainable social and systemic change.” This idea is a core theme of my book with Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, which explores the inner subjective dimensions (behavioral, social, emotional, ethical, spiritual, etc.) that make commoning possible.

An immersion in the commons literature quickly reveals that many truisms of capitalist economics are problematic or simply incorrect. Multiple commons, for example, call into question the presumption of standard economics that private property law, contracts, and free markets are the most reliable, fair, and efficient vehicles for meeting people’s needs. The fable of the Invisible Hand as an engine of progress and social equity is revealed as a just-so story, exposed by the egregiously Visible Hand of state power in creating a rentier capitalism whose markets are anything but free (Standing, 2021). The Covid pandemic, the climate emergency, and the rise of authoritarian nationalism have exposed the profound limitations of the nation-state as it has become a captive or at least deep ally of business interests. Beyond such political concerns, however, it has become clear that representative democracy and centralized bureaucracies have only narrow affordances, in any case, for addressing complex, systemic issues in Earth-friendly, participatory ways.

The exhaustion of liberal reformism – or at least its waning credibility in the public mind and its manifest political deficiencies – suggests that structural changes in the market/state system as constituted must be considered. Broadly speaking, prevailing governance systems cannot deliver results that are fair, effective, rational, and humane over the long term. Some sort of re-imagining – some artful reconfiguration of state power and political life – is urgently needed. But the path forward remains murky. It’s not clear “the way out of no way,” as the US civil rights movement once described its challenges."

(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)

EDITORIALS

Introduction: Advancing the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of The Commons Hendrik Wagenaar, Koen Bartels

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse David Bollier

What is “Political” in Commons-Public Partnership? The Italian Cases of Bologna and Naples Antonio Vesco, Sandro Busso

Relational Ecosystems: Sustaining Prefigurative Change by Creating Conditions for Mutual Learning and Change Koen P. R. Bartels

Knowledge for the Commons: What is Needed Now? Liz Richardson, Catherine Durose, Matt Ryan, Jess Steele

The Incompatibility of the Commons and the Public Roy L. Heidelberg

Towards Democratisation of Public Administration: Public-Commons Partnerships in Barcelona Marina Pera, Sonia Bussu

No Commons Without Micropolitics. Learning with Feminist and Municipalist Movements in Spain Manuela Zechner

Excerpts

Commons-Based Identity Shift

David Bollier:

"The practice and the discourse of commoning has an elemental character: it reflects a desire by people to provision their needs directly, as self-governing communities working outside of the usual circuits of capitalist markets and state power.

Such realizations can entail a shift of identity and culture. Participants come to see that they are not “citizens” petitioning a remote, powerful state. They are not “consumers” seeking satisfaction through the market or “volunteers” donating their time to good causes. People realize they are commoners whose peer-governed activities are helping to constitute a different social and political mise en scene. They realize that their commoning enacts a different social logic, set of provisioning practices, and cultural ethos than the dominant ones of capitalist modernity and liberal, representative democracy."

(https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1389)